Knocking At The Gate

Writing in The New York Review Of Books , Laura Miller goes deep into Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel Of The 22nd Century. The premise is unsettling, as is the title: It is the first book by the Danish poet, novelist, and literary critic to be translated into English and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Presented as a collection of records, primarily the transcripts of statements made by the crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a committee of unspecified composition, it documents the breakdown of the ship’s mission after the vessel arrives at a planet called New Discovery and the crew brings aboard a selection of objects found there. But the objects—which are referred to only as “the objects,” the most reductive and nondescriptive term for pretty much anything—aren’t monsters and don’t chase the crew members around. None of the speakers offer a full description of these things (or creatures?), but Ravn has said they were inspired by the sc...

The Fence itemizes all possible plots by major authors, such as: Anthony Trollope : Your happiness is put on hold when it transpires your fiancé failed to correctly cash a cheque. This lasts for 130 chapters. Everyone else is ordained. More possible plots by major authors here.

David Mamet is inarguably one of our greatest living playwrights, and no small talent as a director. His boldness, his wit, his hard-nosed ability to show us our own demons and our own follies would suggest that anything at all he care to write would be worth reading. Writing in The Washington Post , however, Daniel Oppenheimer finds Mamet's new e-book ( Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch ) to be a disappointment: Telling an author what he should have written is one of the cardinal sins of book criticism. In the case of Recessional , though, it seems like the only critically generous thing to do. Because the alternative is to dwell on the book as it is, which is a pale facsimile of my hypothetical. “Recessional” isn’t really a book at all but a McBook. It’s a collection of disparate pieces, written mostly as columns for National Review, that are given back to us in book form only because the author has a big name and there’s some money to be m...

Writing in The Hedgehog Review , Matthew Mutter reviews two works on value, reason, aesthetics, and the role of authority in the humanities: A Defense of Judgment (2021) by Michael Clune and Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. (2021) by Eric Hayot. How do we know what is good, and how can we be sure of what we know? For years, I played basketball with a humanities skeptic. He was an endowment manager at the Ivy League university from which he had graduated with a degree in economics. He knew I was a professor of literature, and one day he asked what I taught—and did I by any chance teach Moby-Dick ? I nodded, and he said, “You don’t believe the hype, do you?” His proudest moment in college had come when, required to read the novel for a first-year class, he developed a firm belief that Moby-Dick ’s reputation was explainable chiefly by its obscurity. The emperor had no clothes: The novel was taught because it was revered, and revered because it was taught. Baffled...

Photograph of Janelle Monáe by Jheyda McGarrell Speaking with NPR's Weekend Edition , musical phenomenon Janelle Monáe discusses how she came to write her new collection of short stories The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, and what authenticity means in her work: Sometimes what you really want to do can take a backseat because you feel like, "I have to prove this first and then I'll get to that." And I'm at a space where I'm making the most fun music I've ever made, just for the people that I love and care about around me, for us to vibe out to. [I'm] just curating my life in a way where I can do that. You know, giving myself permission — and I think with this book, I hope that people feel the permission to show up as their authentic selves. When the world tells you that everything about you — your queerness, your Blackness, you being a woman, you wanting to be an artist on your own terms — when people try a...

Writing in Book Forum , Gene Seymour reviews the new Zora Neale Hurston essay collection edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and and Genevieve We t: Zora Neale Hurston's literary stature is no longer in dispute, yet people are still trying to put her into a box. “Do you think she was a libertarian?” someone once asked me. For whatever reason, I was too polite to say something like “How the hell should I know?” Far more polite than Hurston would be if she could now answer for herself. Yes, she made conservative, even reactionary noises in her lifetime against the NAACP, leftist politics, Richard Wright, and other socially progressive influences. But tagging Hurston as a libertarian or reactionary is far too reductive for such a formidable polymath whose groundbreaking work as an anthropologist, oral historian, journalist, and gadfly is nearly as monumental as her sui generis fiction, notably her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was allergic to anybody’s p...

Allegra Hyde writes about opening lines in Literary Hub : By “clarity,” I mean the ability of a first sentence to give readers an initial hand-hold for place and/or time and/or character and/or plot. Clarity is essential for a first sentence because, at the start of a story or novel—barring whatever information a reader might have encountered on the jacket copy or in reviews—the reader’s mental theater is a void. An unlit stage. A nothingness. Every word in that first sentence is an opportunity to shine a light on what is to come—to give a reader enough information to stabilize them in some degree of who and where and what the story is about. Full text here.

From a YouTube account named "Sesame Swap," here is a pivotal scene from Denis Villeneuve's Dune in which Paul Atreides (played by Timothée Chalamet ) faces the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam (played by Charlotte Rampling). In this version, however, Paul is played by Elmo.

I've been doing some reading. Catching up on the last four decades, really. So when I read Cormac McCarthy, his writing looks like a sledgehammer and feels like a sledgehammer when it hits you square in the face. His hammers have been forged with such heft that nothing can withstand them. When I read his stuff, I never want to write anything because what else can possibly be said over the unmarked graves of all of these other fallen writers? When I read Toni Morrison, her writing looks like writing from anyone but feels like a sledgehammer when it hits you square in the heart. Her hammers aren't built for heft, though, so as much for speed and dexterity, and they always hit the soft spot, the place where the most damage can be done. When I read her stuff, I never want to write anything because I can't do anything like what she does and besides I'm bleeding out. When I read Jeff VanderMeer, his writing looks like writing from anyone else and it feels like normal writing ...